None of the Ohio Bobcat teams in the previous 50 years have had as good of a team as this one on paper. They were also led by a coach who proved he couldnt win big games and won a grand total of zero MAC Championships. Great that he got us out of winning 3 games per year but his ceiling was mediocrity as evidenced by having as many MAC championships as me.
That said well see if this coach can get a Mac championship and get to 11 or 12 wins. On paper he has the team to do it
I can't speak for all 50 years but I think that the 2012 was much higher thought of in national ranking going into the season. This team is not the favorite in a MAC that is not anywhere as good as the 2012 MAC. A few weeks into the season in 2012, if I recall, we were the favorite in Vegas for the G5 spot in the BCS bowl. We know what happened in 2012. A historic number of injuries happened in just the season where we didn't want it.
We are ranked over 80 in some of these 1-132 rankings. We were ranked in the top 25 on at least one site in 2012. Our Vegas win total is only 7.5 and that's against a weaker schedule than in some years where it was higher. We won't go off as the favorite against SDSU. We wouldn't be favored now against FAU or ISU though if we look good enough in the first couple of weeks that might change. I think that we might be a very slight underdog at Buffalo right now and barely favored at NIU and probably only a 5 point favorite or so against Miami.
Yes, this is on paper one of the two best teams in the MAC. Yes, there is no game on the schedule that we are a real longshot. Yes, winning them all is obviously not impossible. However, until we go out and play a game and look really good doing it I'd have to look at it as very improbable. There are 6 or 7 games that are close to 50/50 and several more that we easily COULD lose if we don't play well. Running 6 games at 50/50 odds is (0.5)^6 is about 1% to 2%. Given that we are actually an underdog in some now and there are more than 6 games we COULD lose you'd realistically think it is worse than that but also given that every team could easily turn out better or worse than we think helps the odds on the extremes at both ends so thinking 50:1 or 75:1 odds on 12-0 is realistic in my mind. Impossible? No. Improbable? Yes. Pretty improbable things both ways have happened recently. The odds of winning 3 in 2021 and 10 in 2022 would have been considered quite improbable going into the season. That isn't the norm however. Most Solich years you would have put us a couple game over .500 and, that, most years, is just what we did.
Is it outlandish to say that this could turn out to the best team since 1968 or possibly better? No. If we overshoot median expectations by as much as we did last year then it will be. If we undershoot as bad as 2021 we'll only win about 4 games against a weak schedule. But I think that we should cool our jets on saying that it is until we see them play.